The Classic Morpurgo Collection. Michael Morpurgo
Jolly Good Fellow over and over again. We had quite a night of it. After a while the manager came to fetch me away. He was taking me up to the Stantons’ rooms, he told me, because the family wanted to thank me personally. When I was ushered in, I found the three of them lined up in the sitting room to greet me, Lizziebeth in her dressing gown. It was all very formal and proper. I stood before them, trying all I could not to catch Lizziebeth’s eye. I knew that just one look between us could give everything away.
“Young man,” Mr Stanton began. “Mrs Stanton and I, but most of all Elizabeth of course, owe you a very great debt of gratitude.”
Suddenly I saw, and I could not have been more surprised, that there were tears in his eyes, and his voice broke. I had never imagined that men such as this could ever cry.
“Elizabeth is our only child,” he went on, his voice charged with emotion. “She is very precious to us, and today you saved her life. We shall not forget this.”
He stepped forward, shook my hand, and presented me with a large white envelope. “No money could ever be enough of course, young man, but this is just a token of our deep appreciation for what you did, for your extraordinary courage.”
I took the envelope from him, and opened it. In it were five ten pound notes. I had never in my life seen so much money. Before I could say thank you, or indeed say anything at all, Lizziebeth was standing there in front of me, holding out a large piece of paper. I was looking down at a picture of Kaspar.
“I drew it for you,” she said. She was speaking to me as if we hardly knew one another. She was an amazing actress. “I like drawing pictures. It’s a cat. I hope you like it. I did it for you because I especially like black cats. And on the other side, you can see…” She turned the paper over for me. “On the other side I’ve done a picture of the ship we’re sailing home on next week. It’s got four big funnels, and Papa says it’s the biggest, fastest ship in the whole wide world. It’s true, isn’t it, Papa?”
“She’s called the Titanic,” Mrs Stanton added. “It’ll be her maiden voyage, you know. Isn’t she the most magnificent ship you ever saw?”
I should have taken more notice of Lizziebeth’s drawings, appreciated them more when she gave them to me, and afterwards, but the truth was I’d never in my life seen so much money. Sitting on my bed late that night, I kept counting it to make sure I wasn’t dreaming it. Everyone on the corridor came in. They had to see it with their own eyes. Mary O’Connell held each note up to the light, I remember, to check it wasn’t a forgery. “Well, you never know, do you? Not with these rich folk,” she said. I told Mary something I hadn’t spoken about with the others, how I’d been thinking about it and was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about taking the money. Mary was always good about right and wrong, she understood these things.
“I didn’t do it for the money, Mary.” I told her, “I did it because it was Lizziebeth up there.”
“I know that, Johnny,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it, does it? This money is your ticket out of here. It’s a God-given fortune, so it is. There’s two years wages here. For God’s sakes, you could go anywhere, do anything. Wouldn’t any one of us like to do that! You don’t want to be having to shine shoes for the rest of your life, do you?”
I lay awake most of that night talking it all through with Kaspar – he was a good listener. By morning I felt that despite everything Mary had said, I might have to give the money back. Lizziebeth’s drawings were a thank you, and that was fine; but I couldn’t help thinking that the money was in some way a kind of pay-off; reward money for a bell-boy. No, I didn’t like being treated like a bell-boy, and I didn’t want a reward. I’d give the money back. But then by morning I’d almost changed my mind again. Maybe Mary had been right after all. I’d keep the money. Why shouldn’t I?
I was still lying there propped up on my pillows, with Kaspar curled up at the end of the bed, looking at Lizziebeth’s picture of the great ship with the four funnels steaming through the ocean, gulls flying overhead, when the door suddenly flew open. Skullface stood there. “I thought so. I thought as much!” she said. “First that girl was in here miaowing like a cat, and that was odd enough. Then a day later she was up here again, wasn’t she? But this time up on the roof, just outside your window. Strange that. Strange sort of coincidence, I thought. D’you know something, Johnny Trott, I don’t believe in coincidences. And now you’re quite the little hero, aren’t you? Well, I weren’t born yesterday. I’m no one’s fool, Johnny Trott. I knew something fishy was going on. But now I can see, it weren’t fishy at all, it were catty, more like.”
She came into the room, shutting the door behind her, and stood over me, a nasty vindictive grin on her face. Kaspar had leaped on to the window-sill, and was hissing and wailing at her furiously. “Well now,” she went on. “I hear you’ve come into the money, Johnny Trott, is that right?” I nodded.
“Here’s the deal then,” she went on. “Either you pack your bags, hand in your uniform and you’re out in the streets within the hour, or you hand over the money. It’s that simple. Hand over the money and you can stay. I’ll even let you keep your horrible cat up here, for a while anyway. There, I can’t be more generous than that, can I now?”
A few moments later as she walked out of my room, tucking the envelope into her pocket, I was almost grateful to her. After all she’d made my decision for me. I sat down on my bed where Kaspar soon joined me for some petting and reassurance. I was thinking things through. I was no poorer than I had been before it all happened. And now at least I had her word, for what it was worth, that Kaspar would be safe, for a while anyway. I still had my job. I felt a great sense of relief, but that was very soon overwhelmed by a wave of sadness. All too soon now Lizziebeth would be leaving and sailing back to America. “I’m going to miss her. We’re both going to miss her, Kaspar,” I said aloud. “We won’t miss the money – we never really had it, did we – but we will miss Lizziebeth. What are we going to do without her?”
I shouldn’t have said anything. Kaspar must have understood enough of it or maybe he just picked up on my sadness, I don’t know. But either way, it became clear to me as the days passed that he understood all too well that Lizziebeth would soon be going. After the very public rooftop rescue – it had been in all the papers too – Lizziebeth had the perfect excuse now to come up and see me often, even for us to be seen talking down in the lobby. So at least we were able to spend more and more time together during those final days.
Time and again I was tempted to tell her about how Skullface had blackmailed me and taken her father’s money, but I thought how angry it would make her, that it was too much to expect a young girl of that age to keep quiet about such a thing. So I didn’t tell her anything about that, but I did tell her things I’d never told anyone else: about my life in the orphanage in Islington, about Harry, the cockroach that I’d kept as a pet in a matchbox, about Mr Wellington, who was supposed to look after us, but who must have hated children so much because he’d cane us so often for the slightest thing. He caned me for keeping Harry, then took him away and stamped on him right in front of my eyes, in front of all of us. That was what made me run away in the end – I’d often thought of it before, but never dared. I told her how I’d wandered the streets of London for weeks, living rough,